Antisemitism Threatens More than Just the Jews

I n a time of escalating antisemitism, it’s increasingly uncertain whether liberal institutions can faithfully and effectively safeguard Jews from those who wish them harm.

Earlier this month at Northwestern University, where I am an undergraduate student, members of the College Democrats painted The Rock, a boulder on campus upon which student organizations display messages or advertise meetings, with reminders to vote in the midterm elections. Soon thereafter, members of the Northwestern chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine — a national organization that outwardly supports terrorism and the targeting of Jewish civilians — painted over the get-out-the-vote message, writing on The Rock the slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”

Though anti-Israel activists employ rhetorical sleight-of-hand to deny the slogan’s antisemitic meaning, its use does in fact signify a hatred of Jews. A free Palestine existing from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would necessarily entail the elimination of Israel and the expulsion of Jews from its borders. The fact that Hamas frequently employs the slogan is further evidence of its antisemitic nature, if any is needed.

This was not the first time SJP had painted the slogan on The Rock. But this time was different. A Jewish College Democrats member wrote an op-ed in the Daily Northwestern, our campus newspaper, noting the antisemitism inherent in the slogan and calling on other Jewish students to urge the school’s administration to condemn its use.

In response to that well-reasoned piece, SJP members assembled print copies of the op-ed, painted “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” on them, and hung up their artwork on a fence facing the campus’s main road. This called for a response from the university, a show of moral courage that Northwestern had so far been unwilling to make. Surely, the university would understand the need for a forceful condemnation of antisemitic harassment of one of its students?

Well, no. Northwestern did issue a statement. But it was, to put it mildly, a farce. The statement, written by Robin R. Means Coleman, the university’s vice president and assistant provost for diversity and inclusion, framed the blatant antisemitism and eliminationism at issue as “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict . . . being vigorously debated on our campus,” a sign of the university community’s commitment to freedom of expression.

The statement took a page from the left-wing antisemite’s playbook. Antisemitism in the United States, particularly when emanating from the left side of the aisle, is often recontextualized to fit a broader narrative. In this case, that narrative is one of intersectionality. White people, in this view, are oppressors, trampling on black and brown people. Jews are white, and thus are oppressors of minorities at home and Palestinians abroad. There can be no legitimate antisemitism coming from those who purport to stand for the Palestinians, given the Palestinians’ oppression, so any appearance of such antisemitism must be explained away as a triumph of free speech.

It is hard to imagine Northwestern University, which offers land acknowledgments recognizing the Native American tribes that occupied Evanston, Ill., before the university’s founding, reframing any other type of targeted, racialized harassment as healthy political discourse.

Northwestern’s failure to confront antisemitism on its campus shows that the progressive Left is, at best, unwilling to defend Jews against antisemitism that does not come from the right. Moreover, the Left’s hesitance to address antisemitism within its own ranks has deleterious effects on explicitly Jewish organizations as well as their secular liberal counterparts.

Such behavior can’t be accepted. Those of us American Jews who are politically conservative have already learned not to have faith in the ability of institutions such as Northwestern to commit to the small-l liberal principles that allow all groups, Jews included, to flourish. Liberal American Jews need not abandon their political orientation to recognize that this is a huge problem — they just need to realize the folly in blindly trusting such institutions to uphold liberal principles.

It is important to remember Jews’ historical role as the canary in the coal mine of liberalism. Wherever antisemitism rears its ugly head in the free societies of the West, attempts to corrode the liberal foundations on which such societies rest are never far behind. In left-of-center institutions, a hesitance to defend Jews from hatred only signals a reticence to defend the liberal values under which Jews — and Americans of all stripes — have prospered.

That hesitance is cropping up again now, and not just at Northwestern. It must be vigorously fought against, both for Jews’ sake and the nation’s.